‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’

Danila Tkachenko, Forgotten Technocracy

Product Description

AV Proyectos 81 Dominique Perrault

AV Proyectos 81 Dominique Perrault

Dossier Dominique Perrault.
Since he won the competition for the National Library of France twenty-eight years ago, Dominique Perrault (Clermont-Ferrand, 1953) has completed a long list of works around the world. The Velodrome in Berlin, the Ewha Womans University in Seoul or the Olympic Tennis Center in Madrid: the buildings designed by the French architect take the continuous and inescapable transformation of the contexts as a given, and use it as a compositional element. Considering the space itself as a material and architecture as an integral part of the landscape, his work reconciles monumentality and simplicity, as can be seen in the projects featured in this dossier.

International Competitions
Even though the crisis has been particularly harsh on architects, Spanish architecture has managed to maintain high quality standards and our studios continue to garner success around the world. Five Spanish teams have carried the day in major competitions held recently beyond our frontiers. The winning proposals of Paredes Pedrosa in Morocco, Nieto Sobejano and MGM in France, José María Sánchez García in Switzerland, and Ecosistema Urbano in the United States show how our architecture is earning an increasing international recognition, culminating this year with the concession of the Pritzker Prize to the Catalan trio RCR Arquitectos.

Six Glass Facades
The six projects selected in this dossier intend to offer an overview of the building potential of glass when its properties, both technical and aesthetic, are fully exploited. Three office buildings provide good example of this: the remodeling of a tower with a modular curtain wall, the extension of a building with a double skin and screen-printed glass anchored perpendicularly to the facade, and a new volume with a facade that mimics cracking ice. The chapter also includes a library that achieves spatial continuity with large corrugated glass surfaces, a tram depot that evokes a sculpture under the light, and a flagship store that revamps its facade with solid glass bricks.

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT. Zhang Daqian Museum
The Barcelona studio EMBT is building a new museum dedicated to Zhang Daqian (1899- 1983), one of the most prominent and sought- after Chinese artists of the 20th century. To go up in his hometown of Neijiang – in the province of Sichuan, in southwest of the country – the building evokes the painter’s friendship with Pablo Picasso proposing a design that blends the cultural essences of the East and West. Starting out from an existing tea house, the project arranges its pavilions around the garden in a play of topographical adaptation at different levels, and these are materialized by structural ribs with a vertical section inspired in the motifs and forms of the artist’s paintings.

Damien Hirst
After ten years of work, the most complex and ambitious project up to date by Damien Hirst (Bristol, 1965) will be on view, until mid-December this year, at the two Venetian venues of the Pinault Collection: Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. Aside from designing the different pieces, the controversial artist has generated a universe capable of making sense of them, defining the cultural, geographical, and temporal interests that would have led to the birth, meta- morphosis, and rebirth of this ‘treasure,’ presenting the collection as if it were the remains of a ship that sank long ago while carrying the pos- sessions of a collector from Antioch, destined for a temple dedicated to the Sun.

Forgotten Technocracy
The thematic and objective approach to the subjects of the images of Danila Tkachenko (Moscow, 1989) frame his work in the field of documentary photography. In his still brief career, the young Russian has already received several awards, including the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2015 thanks to his series ‘Restricted Areas,’ where he travels through almost artificial envi- ronments where the pursuit of technological progress has been frustrated and halted in time by multiple causes – nuclear wars, economic crises, natural disasters, etc. – turning them into abandoned and deserted places, witnesses of a technocratic utopia that never arrived.

Known as much for his theoretical proposals as for his provocative buildings, Rem Koolhaas has become one of the most influential contemporary architects. The first monograph that AV devotes to the Dutch covers his latest period, focused on heritage, history and ecology, and presents buildings carried out by his Rotterdam office since 2000, the year Koolhaas picked up the Pritzker Prize. With an essay and twelve critical texts by Luis Fernández-Galiano, the monograph includes buildings completed by the studio over the last fifteen years: starting with the Prada Epicenter in New York and closing with the Fondazione Prada recently inaugurated in Milan, the issue also features emblematic buildings like the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Seattle Central Library, the Casa da Música in Porto or the CCTV in Beijing, and recent openings like De Rotterdam or the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Furthermore, ten projects in three different continents – among them the Taipei Performing Arts Center, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts of Quebec or the Axel Springer Campus in Berlin – take stock of the growing international presence of the Rotterdam studio, which has set up offices also in New York, Hong Kong, Doha and Dubai.

AV Proyectos 069 DOSSIER GIANCARLO MAZZANTI
DOSSIER GIANCARLO MAZZANTI · HOUSE OF HUNGARIAN MUSIC COMPETITION: FUJIMOTO, ARCVS, AVA, KUMA · OMA’S TAIPEI ARTS CENTER · MONOLITHS · VISUAL COMPLEXITY · CHEMA MADOZ
AV Proyectos 69 presents a selection of ten projects by the Colombian Giancarlo Mazzanti, author of the new Velodrome in Medellín – under construction right now – and who has built, from his studio in Bogotá, some of the most important works of the past years in his country, such as the emblematic Biblioteca España in Medellín or the Pies Descalzos School in Cartagena de Indias. The issue also includes the projects shortlisted in the competition to build the House of Hungarian Music in the City Park of Budapest, finally won by Sou Fujimoto. The chapter devoted to small works shows four monolithic shelters built in Holland and Switzerland, and the construction section offers an in-depth analysis of the Taipei Performing Arts Center by Rem Koolhaas. The issue presents Visual Complexity, a unique project for the visualization of complex information networks, and the closing pages are dedicated to the personal and intimate work of the Madrid-based photographer Chema Madoz.
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